“The Shock Troops of the New Deal”

On May 30, 1937, Republic Steel workers on strike in Chicago were met with fierce repression that resulted in the death of sixteen workers and imprisonment of hundreds more. Earlier that same day, Ernest Calloway arrived in Chicago and got a job on a WPA project researching Chicago’s slums. He eventually secured a position with the Chicago WPA worker education adult program and joined the adult teachers’ union.

Through the WPA, Calloway established relationships with black political figures like union leader A. Philip Randolph and sociologist Horace Clayton. More important for his union career, it was in Chicago that Calloway encountered black union leader Willard Townsend and the struggle to organize the black baggage handlers at railroad terminals known as “red caps.”

Similar to the Pullman sleeping car porters, the red caps had a prestigious reputation among the black community that hid a more ugly reality. They relied mostly on tips for their income and took a great hit during the Depression. The existing union was only going to organize them on a segregated basis, so the International Brotherhood of Red Caps (later to become the United Transport Service Employees of America) was formed instead.

Calloway was brought on as the union’s education director and chief editor of Bags and Baggage, the union newsletter. Here he began to develop his creative vision for worker education that he would continue to implement his entire life. Far from a traditional dry union newsletter, Bags and Baggage featured cartoons, poems, social commentary, and stories of rank-and-file activity. Horace Clayton described it as “the best example of of workers education in a Negro trade union.”

The flowering of the red caps union was made possible by the existence of the CIO, which the red caps had decided to affiliate with in 1942. The CIO embodied the kind of crusading workers’ movement that Calloway and his fellow students had dreamt about at Brookwood. By the time that Calloway began working with the red caps, the CIO had swept its way into the heart of vital American industries like auto manufacturing, steel, meatpacking, rubber, and much more.

The movement represented the forging of class identity and power for the working class as a whole, but this renaissance was particularly profound for black workers. Unlike the AFL, the CIO unions set out to organize all workers regardless of race, proving in practice what they pledged in rhetoric. By 1940, the CIO had already organized 400,000 new black workers into labor unions, quadrupling black union membership nationwide.